22/02/2007

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Die Zeit 22.02.2007

Hanno Rauterberg takes a look at Büro Graft, the architectural office that has won the bid to build an art hall on Berlin's iconographic Schlossplatz. At the moment, the demolished remains of the Palast der Republik Ã¢â¬â the 'Palace of the People' of the former GDR - are being cleared away, in 2010, the foundation stone of the Humboldt-Forum will be laid and then Graft will begin building its privately-funded exhibition space for Berlin's "young, successful art scene." Of the design that has been published in the art magazine Monopol, Rautenberg writes, "The idealism is great, the enthusiasm overwhelming. But not because Berlin needs such a pavilion. With its size Ã¢â¬â not even 1000 square metres Ã¢â¬â it won't be able to compete with other spaces in Berlin. Much more important is its symbolic value: Berlin is loosening up. No other architects have been able to design something promising for this depressing space. Graft did. The design looks like a glistening vision in the middle of desolate emptiness. They distance themselves from all the political debates, they remove their building from history, they want to build a cloud."

Frankfurter Rundschau 22.02.2007

The second album by the German boy group Tokio Hotel Ã¢â¬â from the East German city of Magdeburg - comes out tomorrow. Elke Buhr looks at the phenomenon, which has created both devoted fans and avowed enemies, and discovers unimagined power. "On stage, Bill turns into the kid kaiser of the German pop scene. In an effortless flirtation he wraps thousands of screeching girlies about his little finger. He writhes like Iggy Pop's grandson, and has perfected all the major gestures of sing-along animation, conducting the undulant hysterical masses with utmost elegance. In tandem with his young, mostly female fans, the androgynous David-Bowie-child Bill Kaulitz develops a striking form of sexual energy, an eroticism of the 'as if.' At the same time as he re-enacts all the age-old, bow-legged rock poses, he charmingly buries them as well."

Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.02.2007

Jonathan Fischer reports on conflict in the USA around the question of whether Democratic presidential candidateBarack Obama is black enough to represent Afro-Americans. "'Is Obama black enough?' That was the title of a recent story in Time Magazine, and the people there weren't the only ones to ask the question. Afro-American media are engaged in fervent debate about whether the senator - who in eleven years has catapulted from state jurist to the sensation of the 2008 presidential election campaign - is black at all, or if he represents 'black American experience.' For one thing, that has to do with his own past. He had a sheltered upbringing in Hawaii, and studied at the best universities. For another, it has to do with his parents. His father is Kenyan, his mother a white native of Kansas. His multicultural origins may have helped Obama win the sympathies of the American middle class. But that is exactly what the self-appointed custodians of Afro-American authenticity find suspicious. For example, conservative cultural critic Stanley Crouch wrote in a column for the New York Daily News that the immigrant's son lacks direct ties to the history of slavery and the civil rights movement. His article was entitled 'Obama: Not Black Like Me'."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 22.02.2007

Twenty years after the death of Andy Warhol, the paper dedicates a lengthy interview to artist Richard Pettibone, who explains why he paints paintings that Ã¢â¬â apart from the size Ã¢â¬â resemble Warhol's to a T. And he tells how it all began: "I was with him shortly before he died, and showed him a series of thirty-two soup cans.... He said he thought they were great. I gave him one, and he said, but then one of the series will be missing. I said no problem, I'll replace it. I asked him which soup he wanted and he said immediately: tomato soup." Another text gives a short portrait of Pettibone, and here a link to Google Images.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 22.02.2007

Jonathan Fischer takes a look at the relationship between pimp and pop. He finds that HipHop has a tendency to ally itself with porno, as in the "black 'adult entertainment'" of copulation comedians such as Rudy Ray Moore or Redd Foxx; at the same time he sees evidence of an "implicitly racist marketing policy: white youth should be able to project their fantasies on black video strippers, while rap makes clear that it's dealing with 'hoes' and 'bitches', subhuman beings. And the female rappers? Obviously, Missy Elliott, Foxy Brown and Lil' Kim are only all too happy to play along with the stereotype. Recently there were protests when the rapper Nelly, from the deep American south, rapped 'I said it must be ya ass / cause it ain't ya face' while in the video, a stripper pulled his credit card through her rear."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÃÂ ÃÂ about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more